AnimalOff-roading, most weekends
ThingA car permanently full of sand
Kids eating sand in the desert. With the first one, two young parents obsessing. With the second, "nah, it's fine." Same desert, four years apart.
For individuals
Find the stories only you can tell
Most storytelling training starts at delivery. This starts two steps earlier: finding the story in the first place.
NamePlaceAnimalThing
Leading a team or a company?This page is for individuals. The workshop for client-facing teams has its own page.For teams →
Already convinced? Pick one — this repeats at the bottom if you'd rather keep reading first.
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Free · live · Nov 18Join the Lightning Session (1 hour)
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$300 · live · Dec 5Sign up for the full workshop (4 hours)
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The Lightning Session and the workshop run on Maven, a platform for live online courses.
AI can write your post, your deck, your bio. It cannot write your life.
Ten, twenty, thirty years in, you're carrying more lived experience than you can account for. Rooms you sat in. Decisions that went wrong in interesting ways. The thing you do on weekends that explains you better than your job title.
That pile can't be generated, copied or outsourced. Everyone's output is converging — same tools, same tone, same credentials in the same room. Lived experience is what's left, and almost none of it has been examined.
The four steps
Two blocks, four hours
1 · Map
Map
Places you lived down the side, names you answered to across the top.
2 · Mine
Mine
Pick a live cell. Drop in the two probes, then widen with the four lenses.
3 · Cut
Cut
Tag the feeling — hard, weird, scary, stupid — then find the shape underneath.
4 · Show
Show
The same story runs differently in a pitch, on a podcast, at a dinner. What moves is where the turn sits.
Block one, Unearthing. Map and Mine — most of the workshop, and where nobody else teaches.
Block two, Shaping. Cut and Show — covered properly, not dwelt on, shaped live with a custom AI tool built for this.
Map — the grid
Places × namesPlaces you lived down the side. Names you answered to across the top. Mark what existed — most of the grid stays empty, and that's doing work too. What's left is your territory, already a portrait.
| Place ↓ / Name → | Kid | Student | Employee | Entrepreneur | Father |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bombay | |||||
| Dubai | |||||
| Madras | |||||
| Mumbai | |||||
| New Jersey |
a cell that existed
opened below
empty = never happened
Dig where the row is crowded. Simultaneously a new father, a new immigrant, a first-time founder — several names at once means several things going wrong at once.
Mine — the two probes
Animal & thingThe grid tells you where and who. The probes tell you what it felt like to be there. Animal — what you did with your body, your brain, your breath. Thing — what you did with your hands. Neither is the story. Both bring the memory back in colour.
Dubai · Father
Dubai · Employee
Animal—
ThingA meeting room, a TV on somewhere
The day the world stopped. You remember exactly where you were standing. The client wanted to carry on with the meeting, as though nothing had happened.
Same city, same year, two different names — two stories with nothing in common. That's the grid earning its keep.
Mine — the four lenses
The multiplierEach seed gets asked four questions. One coordinate can yield four unrelated stories.
Point
It happened to me.
Line
It happened to someone right beside me.
Square
It happened around me, in my vicinity.
Cube
It happened in the world, and I was somewhere when it did.
A Cube story is still told from the Point. The world event isn't the story — a room no one could reach, and a client who wanted to keep going, is. You're always the point of contact.
Free lesson vs. paid workshop
The cut point is the grid
Lightning lesson · Nov 11 · free
Map, and one dig
Every city you've lived in, then every city you've holidayed in. One era, one cell, one seed, taken to a told sixty-second story.
They leave withOne square of a territory they can now see the edges of.
Workshop · 4 hrs · paid
The full claim
Build the real grid. Work the cells under a timer, run all four lenses, then cut and stage the survivors for three different rooms.
They leave withStories they can tell on Monday, and a mapped claim for the rest.
About me
Track record
I didn't arrive at this as theory.
TED
The talk on what obituaries reveal about living well. Watched more than two million times.
Stage
Years speaking from stages, plus a handful of open mics, one of them at the Comedy Cellar — all hunting the same thing: the one detail that makes a room lean in.
The book
Name, Place, Animal, Thing, an Amazon bestseller. This page is the method inside it, turned into a workshop.
I founded StreamAlive after two years of watching live audiences get ignored. Every method on this page, I used on myself first.
Start here
Pick your way in
Free to try, or go straight to the full workshop. Every door leads to the same grid.
Free · ongoingSubscribe to the newsletter
→
Free · live · Nov 18Join the Lightning Session (1 hour)
→
$300 · live · Dec 5Sign up for the full workshop (4 hours)
→
The Lightning Session and the workshop run on Maven, a platform for live online courses.
Bringing this to your team or company? See the team workshop or message me on LinkedIn.